Seagate is making a belated but potentially market-changing entry into the solid-state drive market.
Seagate Pulsar solid-state drive.
(Credit: Seagate)Solid-state drives are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at retrieving data, and have won limited acceptance in the laptop market. Seagate, however, is targeting the more lucrative and potentially larger server market and will compete with likes of Intel, Micron Technology, Samsung, and STEC.
Seagate's first salvo in the market is the new Pulsar drive, which is designed for blade computers and general server applications and offers up to 200 gigabytes of capacity based on the industry-standard Serial ATA interface.
Though pricier than hard-disk drives, the key dollar metric for solid-state drives in the server market is IOPS, or input/output operations per second. The more IOPS a large bank, for example, gets from a server equipped with solid-state drives, the more cost-effective the technology can be compared with hard-disk drives.
"SSDs provide superior dollars per IOP as compared to traditional hard drives," said Rich Vignes, a senior product line manager at Seagate.
Pulsar drives achieve a peak performance of up to 30,000 read IOPS and 25,000 write IOPS, Seagate says, many times the performance of even the fastest hard disk drives. Seagate began shipping Pulsar units to select customers in September.
"With the entry of the world's largest [hard-disk drive] manufacturer, this further validates the viability of SSDs in the computing environment," said Gregory Wong, president of Forward Insights, which tracks the solid-state drive market.
Gartner estimates that unit growth in the server solid-state drive market will double and sales are forecast to reach $1 billion for 2010, according to data provided by Seagate.
Seagate did not divulge pricing information. Companies that use its solid-state drives will provide pricing for end products.
IBM will release a radical new chip next year that will go into a University of Illinois supercomputer in a quest to build what may become the world's fastest supercomputer.
That university's supercomputer center is a storied place, home to both famous fictional and real supercomputers. The notorious HAL 9000 sentient supercomputer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" was built in Urbana, Illinois, presumably on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.
The Power7 chip die.
(Credit: IBM)Though not aspiring to artificial intelligence, the IBM Blue Waters project supercomputer, like the HAL 9000 series, will be able to do massively complex calculations in an instant and, like HAL, be built in Urbana-Champaign. It is being housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus specifically for the computer that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today. (A petaflop is 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of supercomputer performance.)
Part of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, it will be the largest publicly accessible supercomputer in the world when it's turned on sometime in 2011.
Supercomputers are essentially a large collection of microprocessors acting in concert on a complex problem. As processor designs go, the upcoming Blue Waters' IBM Power7 processor--due in the first half of 2010--is a big step for IBM: the processor integrates the features of a chip used in its "Roadrunner" supercomputer, which has often been ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world. Power7 fuses the flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate "Cell" processor--the latter was part of IBM's Roadrunner system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to Bradley McCredie, an IBM Fellow in the Systems and Technology Group.
"We took some of that genetic material from the Cell program--ways to do floating point (calculations)--and embedded that right into the Power7 core," McCredie said in an interview with CNET.
But that's not the only thing that makes the Power7 chip special. It integrates eight processing cores in one chip package and each core can execute four tasks--called "threads"--turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors typically have two threads per processing core.
Artist rendering of University of Illinois center that will house IBM's Blue Waters supercomputer
(Credit: University of Illinois)IBM is also using novel memory technology. Widely used "static" RAM memory, used as the on-chip memory in almost all processors today, can add as much as a billion transistors to high-end processors. IBM wanted to avoid these ballooning--and costly--chip counts and elected to use a technology called E-DRAM, keeping the total number of transistors to 1.2 billion. "The equivalent number of transistors if we had done all of the cache in (static RAM) is well in excess of two billion," McCredie said.
And the chip's speed? Between ... Read more
Intel on Monday disclosed a version of its Xeon processor line optimized for supercomputers and announced a partnership with NEC to develop future supercomputers.
At Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Ore., Intel unveiled a future version of its "Nehalem-EX" processor optimized for supercomputers. The six-core chip will run at higher speeds than eight-core versions of the Nehalem-EX processors and will offer advantages for supercomputer specific tasks, Intel said in a statement. Intel also refers to supercomputing as high-performance computing, or HPC.
The chip architecture will offer greater memory speeds and capacity and will allow customers to build single computers or "nodes" with up to 256 such processors, according to Intel. This will be available next year, Intel said.
Intel said Monday that four out of every five supercomputers on the Top500 list published Monday are powered by Intel processors.
Intel also announced that it is partnering with Japan's NEC--that country's largest supercomputer vendor--to jointly develop technologies "that will push the boundaries of supercomputing performance," according to a joint statement.
NEC will use the technologies in future supercomputers based on the Intel Xeon processor and other technologies such as AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions), an extension to Intel's x86 instruction set architecture.
AVX will be used with Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge microarchitecture due in 2011, according to Intel.
"With NEC further innovating on Intel Xeon processor-based systems, Intel is poised to bring Intel Xeon processor performance to an even wider supercomputing audience, " said Richard Dracott, general manager of Intel's High Performance Computing Group, in a statement.
Fumihiko Hisamitsu, general manager of HPC Division at NEC, said: "NEC's substantial experience in the development of vector processing systems...is a natural fit for taking Intel architecture further into new markets."
A vector processor design can perform operations on multiple data elements simultaneously. Intel Xeon chips are good at scalar processing, which handles one data item at a time.
The initial focus of the collaboration will be the development of technology to boost the memory speed and scalability--the latter refers to expanding a system to increase performance or capacity. "Such enhancements are intended to benefit systems targeting not only the very high end of the scientific computing market segment, but also to benefit smaller HPC installations," the two companies said.
NEC will also continue to sell its existing SX vector processor-based products. NEC, for example, currently markets the SX-9 supercomputer.
Updated at 2:15 p.m. PDT: adding information about Dell system.
The main message of the new Core i5 chip is simple: it's cheap--even cheaper than Intel chips based on older technology.
(Credit:
Amazon)
The i5, which brings Intel's new "Nehalem" microarchitecture into the mainstream PC market, immediately makes many, if not most, of the older desktop processors obsolete. Consumers need look no further than pricing on sites like Amazon. The i5-750 lists for $250, while the older--based on Intel's last-generation "Core 2" microarchitecture--Q9650 lists for $319.
The official pricing from Intel in quantities of 1,000 units makes the price gap even more stark: $196 for the i5 and $316 for the Q9650.
"The new Core i7's and Core i5's bring pricing to more mainstream levels, with the Core i5-750 at a 1KU (1,000 units) price of $196, which is well below the Core 2 Quad Q9650 at $316," said Intel spokesman George Alfs.
"We are very serious about bringing all new Core processors to new price points and you'll see this trend continue with Westmere," he said, referring to Intel's upcoming processors based on a next-generation 32-nanometer manufacturing process.
Comparing the old with the new, some consumers might point out that the older Q9650 has, for example, more on-chip memory and a higher clock speed than the Core i5. But the writing is on the wall: consumers will almost always opt for new over old when new is less expensive.
On Tuesday, Dell began offering the Studio XPS 8000 tower with the Core i5 starting at $799 and packing 4GB of "Dual Channel DDR3 memory" and a 500GB hard disk drive, among other features. Adding a 20-inch monitor hikes this to $979.
The message is more muddled, however, for the updated Core i7 processors because they maintain the same "i7" identifier as their predecessors--first launched in November--but offer different features that are not readily apparent to less-sophisticated buyers and potentially vexing for some savvy consumers.
"It gets confusing for the more technically knowledgeable buyer, and for us as system builders," said Kelt Reeves, president of enthusiast PC maker Falcon Northwest. "Buying a Core-i7 950 model? Well then you can have a maximum of 12 gigs (gigabytes) of triple channel memory and you buy your memory in sets of 3 sticks. Buying a Core i7-870? Well then your memory is installed in pairs and the max you can have is 8 gigs," he explained.
Reeves continued. "For instance, if you're a heavy Photoshop user having 12 gigs of the fastest memory might be very important to you," he added, saying in that case a consumer would want to opt for a Core i7 900 series over the newer 800 series.
There are other gotchas too. On the i5 processors a feature called hyperthreading is not included, as CNET's Rich Brown pointed out Tuesday. Hyperthreading effectively doubles the number of tasks--or processing threads--a chip can do. "Heavy multitaskers and those who use multithreaded software will feel the loss here," Brown said.
The Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif this week is focusing on high-end chips for servers and scientific computers, with IBM's upcoming Power7 as a standout.
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On Tuesday, IBM will give a presentation on its next-generation server chip, the Power7. IBM documentation describes the chip as having up to eight cores. A dual-chip module holds two processors for a total of 16 cores, according to IBM.
Each core has a rated performance of 32 gigaflops, providing 256 gigaflops per processor--one of the fastest chips to date based on this scientific-centric performance benchmark.
Power7 will be used in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications "Blue Waters" supercomputer, the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications, according to the NCSA. A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second.
Power7 "will be the first of a powerful new system design from IBM. The design includes extensive research and development in new chip technology, interconnect technology, operating systems, compiler, and programming environments," according to the NCSA.
Other chips to be described at the conference include the Sparc64 VIIIfx: Fujitsu's new 8-core processor for Peta scale computing. Sun will discuss its "next-generation multi-threaded processor Rainbow Falls" and AMD will spell out its Magny Cours processor, 12-core chip.
Intel will present a paper on its upcoming Nehalem server processor.
Intel will also discuss Moorestown, an upcoming version of the Atom processor targeted at mobile Internet devices and smartphones. Intel will also give a presentation entitled "Understanding the Intel Next Generation Microarchitectures (Nehalem and Westmere) transitioning into the Mainstream."
Core i3, i5, i7. A straightforward, if not insipid, branding scheme, right? Wrong. Those alphanumeric identifiers are fighting words.
Last week, Intel announced a new branding scheme for its upcoming processors. In a blog, spokesman Bill Calder wrote that the branding will be "simplified into entry-level (Intel Core i3), mid-level (Intel Core i5), and high-level (Intel Core i7)." Intel calls the "i" suffix an identifier.
The upcoming Lynnfield chip for desktop PCs, for example, will be available as either Intel Core i5 or Intel Core i7 depending upon the feature set and capability. The upshot of the new branding is to make it easier for less tech-savvy consumers to readily identify classes of Intel chips based three simple identifiers, according to Calder.
But judging by the tenor of many of the comments attached to Calder's brand structure blog, you would think the chipmaker had committed high treason.
In the minds of some, it did. The shortcomings of the current naming scheme notwithstanding, many tech-savvy consumers have gotten used to it. For example, Core 2 Quad means a chip built on the Core 2 architecture with 4 processing cores. Core 2 Duo indicates two cores.
One of the most common criticisms cited in the comments section is that i3, i5, and i7 are too vague. "Above all, I'd like to see...at a glance how many cores and what features they have (or have not)," one comment said. Another comment suggested that Intel add more identifiers. For example, Intel Core i5 4100, where 4 is the number of cores and 100 is a speed rating.
Yet another idea was this: Intel/name/number/year, where "name" is the product name, "number" is a bigger-is-better ranking, and "year" the year the architecture was released.
And another: "Either ditch the Celeron, Pentium and Xeon names completely or embrace them completely. These are fairly well known as the 'good, better, best'."
... Read moreAMD launched its first six-core processor, which will compete against Intel's "Dunnington" chip.
The Cray XT5m supercomputer will use the Istanbul chip
(Credit: Cray)The "Istanbul" Opteron processor is for high-end server computers that use two, four, and eight processors or "sockets." Intel has been shipping a six-core processor for this market since September of last year and will bring out a processor based on its new Nehalem architecture for this segment later this year.
Among other new features, AMD is touting an Istanbul technology called HT Assist. The previous way of retrieving data from the processor's memory was "like checking every room in your house for your car keys," said Pat Patla, AMD's general manager of the server workstation group, in a phone interview last week. With HT Assist, "You know where your car keys are," he said. "It's much more efficient and takes out a lot of traffic," Patla added.
Patla also said that AMD is ahead of schedule with this chip, in stark contrast with the company's ill-fated quad-core Barcelona processor, which saw repeated delays. "Within almost a 15-month period of time we were able to design the product, tape out the product (final stage before production), verify the product and launch," Patla said about Istanbul.
Systems based on six-core AMD Opteron processors are expected to be available beginning this month from server suppliers including Cray, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, AMD said Monday.
Istanbul boasts up to 34 percent more performance-per-watt over the previous-generation quad-core processors.
Intel on Tuesday said it will ship a server chip that contains up to eight processing cores later this year, while IBM showed off a high-end server in the works that uses eight such chips, yielding 64 cores.
Intel's Nehalem-EX architecture supports up to eight processors and each processor can integrate up to eight cores.
(Credit: Intel)Intel's Nehalem-EX processor, in production later this year and expected to be shipping in high-end server systems by early 2010, will feature up to eight cores inside a single chip that supports 16 threads, according to Boyd Davis, Intel's general manager of the Server Platforms Marketing Group, speaking at a teleconference on Tuesday.
Using threads, Intel essentially doubles the amount of work that can be done on each processing core.
IBM, which participated in the conference, discussed a server currently under development that uses 64 Nehalem-EX cores (eight processors) and can handle 128 threads, according to Alex Yost, vice president IBM BladeCenter. "We're very excited today to be the first to demonstrate Nehalem-EX," Yost said.
Nehalem-EX will also double the memory capacity with up to 16 memory slots per processor socket, and offer four high-bandwidth "QuickPath" Interconnect links.
Intel also said the currently-shipping Nehalem server chip is making market gains. Intel's currently-available Xeon 5500, the first server processor based on Intel's Nehalem architecture, will be "greater than half of shipments" for Intel's high-volume two-processor (aka, "two-socket") server shipments by August, according to Davis.
"Customer acceptance has been quite strong," Boyd said. "From an introduction at the very end of March to representing the majority of our shipments in the market for two-processor servers by the August time frame," he said.
Intel showed off a prototype server that can accommodate four eight-core Nehalem-EX processors.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Intel's prototype Nehalem-EX server accommodates eight of these memory cards. They'll use relatively conventional DDR3 memory rather than the FB-DIMM technology Intel's current Xeon 7300 systems.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Updated at 10:00 a.m. PDT with correction about launch of Nehalem-EX processor.
Intel is expected to announce details of an 8-core processor for the high-end server market next week.
The chip itself will not actually ship in systems until late 2009 or early 2010.
The 8-core "Nehalem-EX" Xeon processor is designed for servers that can use more than two processors (referred to as "sockets" in server argot). Currently, Intel is shipping Nehalem Xeon processors for servers with two sockets.
Nehalem is the same architecture used in Intel's Core i7 desktop processor line.
The Nehalem-EX is expected to become Intel's top-line Xeon processor. Currently, the six-core "Dunnington" processor, based on Intel's older Penryn architecture, is Intel's highest-performance chip for multi-processor servers.
Nehalem-EX packs 2.3 billion transistors and its eight cores are capable of executing 16 threads (or tasks) at the same time. The chip also has "integrated power gates" for lowering power-consumption.
The announcement of details is slated for May 26. Boyd Davis, Intel's general manager of Server Platforms Marketing Group, will host the roll-out event and "discuss how this new server product raises the standard in cost-effective RISC replacement solutions," according to an Intel note about the event.
Advanced Micro Devices' server roadmap is solid but its mainstream mobile lineup is languishing.
AMD's six-core "Istanbul" processor release was moved up to June
(Credit: AMD)First, the good news. These days AMD is walking the talk. This is a radical change from the AMD of 2007-2008, which always seemed to have a hopper full of Intel-vanquishing paper processors that, if they did materialize, disappointed.
Fast forward to AMD's Tuesday earnings announcement, when the company said it was actually moving up the introduction its most sophisticated processor, the six-core Istanbul, to June.
And AMD has proved its silicon mettle at large server customers such as IBM and Sun Microsystems--the latter's executive vice president John Fowler had nothing but praise for AMD processors in high-end Sun server systems.
In a "Global Webcast" on server technology Wednesday, Patrick Patla, a vice president in AMD's server and workstation business, revealed a strong roadmap, saying that 8- and 12-core "Magny-Cours" processors will appear in 2010. "We're currently working on new processors which we expect will deliver more than 35 times the performance of the original single-core AMD Opteron processor released in 2003," Patla said in a statement.
Intel, of course, will also bring out many-core processors, but AMD is keeping pace, and, according to people who should know, like Sun's Fowler, maybe more than keeping pace.
Now, the bad news. This post today on CNET's Crave blog says it all: "One of our biggest issues with HP's Pavilion dv3z was its AMD processor, keeping it from beating out the performance of comparable 13- and 14-inch laptops with Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs." This is, by no means, the first review that expresses this sentiment. In short, AMD mobile platforms consistently come up short in the high-profile, burgeoning laptop market. Will AMD close the gap in 2009?
Maybe one answer to that question is AMD's Neo chip that powers the low-cost, ultra-thin HP Pavilion dv2 laptop. More than a Netbook but less than a mainstream laptop, this kind of sleek mobile device could eventually eclipse the high-end Netbook segment.
AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said Tuesday that the single-core Neo processor will get a dual-core sibling dubbed "Congo" by summer. A dual-core processor in this low-cost, MacBook-Air-for-the-masses category is a compelling proposition. AMD needs to stay ahead of the game, especially when Intel brings out chips for this category in the May-June timeframe.
